“Six Sigma” has become a new standard for quality control in the industrial world. General Electric alone has saved 5 billion dollars within 3 years since they introduced the program. Sigma (σ) is a Greek alphabet symbol used to represent the standard deviation in statistics. It is a good measurement for the process variability in statistical quality control.
Compared to the previous “Three Sigma” industrial standard that requires a process to produce 99.933% good parts, the “Six Sigma” standard requires the process to produce 99.9999966% good parts. This means that for every one million products, a process with Six Sigma capability will produce almost zero defective parts.
Industry surveys show that a process will typically shift 1.5 Sigma from its center. When this happens, a process with Three Sigma capability will start to produce thousands of bad parts per million while a Six Sigma process will only produce a few bad parts. The following table lists Sigma Numbers and their Defects per Million (DPM) with a 1.5σ shift.
Sigma (σ)Defects per Million (DPM)2.0308,3003.067,0004.06,2205.02336.03.4
These numbers are astonishing since many industrial processes are probably running at a Two Sigma level since their quality related process variables are under manual control. That means, these processes are producing 15% to 30% waste in their normal operations. If quality variables are under manual control, quality and efficiency will depend very much on the individual operator's skill, experience, and work attitude. The operator has to be able to tweak all the magic knobs, wait, and hope the final products produced are within the specifications.
1. Quality Control History and Status
Quality control has gone through 4 stages that can be summarized in the following table:
StagePeriodDescription and Tools11900 to 1940Product Inspection = Quality Control21940 to 1960Statistical Quality Control (SQC)31960 to 1986Total Quality Control (TQC)41987 to Present(i) Online SQC using computer systems(ii) CSPC = Conventional Process Control +Statistical Process Control
In the beginning of the 20th century, American engineer T. W. Taylor proposed the idea of product inspection in his scientific management theory. Products are tested against their specifications to pass the good products and reject the bad ones. Although a very large percentage of products today are still made in this way, the technique has major shortcomings including: (1) It does not address the concept of quality; (2) Defective parts are rejected not prevented.
In the early 1940s, the United States required a large volume of high-quality goods for World War II efforts. The government hired a group of scientists to implement a series of quality control standards, thereby forcing the industry to Statistical Quality Control (SQC) methods proposed by Dr. Shewhart and others. SQC is a quality control method based on statistics, which can distinguish the common causes and special causes of quality variations so that quality inspections can be simplified and quality problems can be prevented. [1]
In the 1960s, Japan rebuilt its industry with the help of SQC introduced by Dr. Deming, an America quality control legend. Japan not only applied SQC to its production, but also improved it with a new name, Total Quality Control. TQC embodies a number of new concepts including: (1) QC is everyone's job and (2) Apply QC to all areas possible. [2]
During the 1980s, the huge success of the Japanese quality-based business model forced American industries to learn and apply TQC, and the other quality control and management methods including the well-known Deming's fourteen point management philosophy. [3] In the late 1980s, personal computers made online SQC applications popular and helped industries to improve product quality tremendously, especially in the discrete manufacturing industry. [4]
Unfortunately, however, Statistical Quality Control methods are not sufficient for “true quality control.” Today, a large percentage of processes are still running in 2 to 3 Sigma conditions even though online SQC systems are used. This is because although SQC/SPC tools can identify a process's unwanted variations, it cannot tell how to eliminate or reduce them. In practice, there can be multiple reasons for unwanted variations including (1) human errors, (2) lack of process capability, and (3) poor control of process variables.
In the early 1990s, the author of this patent application observed this reality and proposed the idea of CSPC, which states that quality control relies on the combination of Conventional Process Control and Statistical Quality Control. [5][6][7] The idea is very simple. SQC can find the abnormal causes of variations but it is up to the automatic control system to reduce the variations and keep them under control. However, at the time, PID based control systems could not provide adequate control for many quality variables. This led the author to spend years of work seeking more effective control methods and eventually developed the Model-Free Adaptive (MFA) control technology. The first MFA control patent was filed on Oct. 6, 1997 with Ser. No. 08/944,450 and allowed in January 2000.
2. Control Quality Variables Automatically
To conclude, The most effective way to solve quality problems permanently is to control the quality variables through an automatic process control system. Therefore, it is desirable to develop an automatic control system that can control quality variables automatically and force the quality variables to track their setpoints while the process has to go through various production changeovers in batch, recipe, and product size, etc.
The Model-Free Adaptive (MFA) control methodology described in U.S. patent Ser. No. 08/944,450, and patent application Ser. Nos. 09/143,165 and 09/174,156 are able to deal with various complex systems and effectively control quality related process variables. However, we still face the following difficulties when controlling quality variables:                a) The process has significant time-delays and the delay time varies due to production speed changes;        b) The process also has large disturbances due to “wild” product inflow changes, load changes, etc.; and        c) The quality variables cannot be measured online and the measurement for the quality is based on off-line lab test data or other off-line measurement methods; and        d) There is a big change in the system dynamics so that a regular MFA controller is unable to provide prompt and adequate control action to meet the control performance criteria.        
To describe the application in more detail, a zinc galvanizing process is studied in the following. A continuous galvanizing process applies a thin surface coating of zinc to steel products and is a critical operating unit in steel sheet production. Steel sheets are popular products used for cans, refrigerators, and automobiles, etc. The thickness of the zinc layer is an important quality variable. Too thin a layer can cause corrosion and damage the product, and too thick a layer will waste too much zinc, a precious metal.
From a control point of view, a continuous galvanizing process has the following behavior: (1) nonlinear, (2) large and varying time delays, (3) multivariable, and (4) frequent production changeovers. According to an industry survey, the thickness of most continuous galvanizing processes is still under manual control resulting in lower efficiency, wasted manpower and materials, and inconsistent product quality.
In this patent application, we introduce a Model-Free Adaptive control system to automatically control the quality variables and quality related process variables.